At first glance, one might come to the conclusion that a bear would make a great friend. After all, they're cute, they live in caves, and they provide great protection from thieves and robots. But when you look a little closer, bears actually do not make good friends.

First off, you can't trust a bear. They're wild animals and you never know what they might do. Movies like Gentle Ben might fool you otherwise, but a bear is anything but trustworthy. Do you know what the number one cause of picnic basket thefts at national parks is? Yeap, bears. How can you ever trust someone that would willingly just steal a picnic basket? That's someone's lunch in there, now they're hungry! And they'll probably go down to the river to try and catch some salmon and ruin their new shoes or worse, they'll be eaten by another bear who is trying to catch salmon in the river!

Lots of people think living in a cave is cool, after all, Batman did it and he's freaking sweet. But there are a few things you might not know. First of all, those luxuries you enjoy like plumbing, heating, and Playstation 2 aren't available in a cave. I don't even like to go over to someone's house if they don't have cable, I can't imagine going to visit a friend in a cave! Caves are also full of bats. Which are blind. So that means they'd probably be flying into you all the time because they wouldn't see you there. That would be more annoying than reruns of the Chevy Chase show on prime time television.

One bonus of having a big friend (such as a bear) is that if anyone ever messes with you, they'll have their arms ripped off and be beaten to death with them. No one would mess with you at the bars if you had a grizzly bear at your side. And thieves would think twice about robbing your home if you had a bear standing guard. That sounds all good and dandy, but have you stopped to consider the ramifications of such a needlessly brutal form of protection? Sure you might not get your ass kicked, but if you sick a bear on someone, expect to have your carpet/shirt/completion ruined by a splattering of blood and bone chips. Let me tell you from experienced, blood is really hard to get out of white carpet, ceilings, and car trunks.

At least the protection from robots thing is good, right? Wrong! In 1987, Bears and Robots signed the Bears and Robots Kill Humans Agreement of 1984. While the full details of this agreement are far to complicated for me to understand, the basics of the agreement is that Bears and Robots have agreed not to fight with each other and instead concentrate their efforts on promoting Mexican made goods in America. The title of the agreement is very misleading, but it still means that Bears won't be protecting you from Robots because they'll be too busy promoting poorly manufactured electronic equipment and illegally imported piñatas.

Given everything that I have stated here, and many other things which I assume you know about bears such as their tendency to leave the toilet seat up, it is obvious that bears don't make good friends. Should a bear ever approach you and attempt to gain your friendship, possibly by giving you the severed-head of your arch-nemesis, heed my warnings today. It may be fun for a while, but b